Comment by stetrain
5 hours ago
The choice has happened over many years. Incrementally consumers were offered the choice of the same size phone or larger, and they kept choosing larger.
If the smaller iPhones and Android phones of 10+ years ago had continued to sell well as larger models were introduced alongside them, they'd still be selling phones that size today.
I wonder what percentage of people who complain about not being able to buy smaller phones actually ever bought the smaller phones when they were available. Are these people carrying 3rd gen iPhone SEs right now? I suspect no.
It’s not as if Apple dislikes money. If they believed the market for small phones was large enough, they’d still be selling small phones.
I was still using my iPhone 13 mini until last week when I bought an Air. As a city dweller without a car, I'm constantly in situations where I'm carrying something in one hand and need to pull out my phone for something. Now with this huge form factor I can't comfortably do that. For example, I was traveling internationally and was carrying my duffel bag in one hand and needed to get information out of the Airbnb app on my phone, and I almost dropped it. The mini would have been (and was always) fine in these circumstances.
The Air doesn't even fit in my jeans comfortably, I have to carry it in my jacket now (what do I do in summer?). I'm considering returning it and switching back to my mini until it just can't run anymore.
Apple needs to realize the user base that wants a portable, one handed phone isn't the same market that wants a cheap phone. I paid more for a worse spec'd phone (Air vs 17), solely hoping it would be easier to use as a mobile, out in the world device. It's not. If they launched the same exact mini with a processor bump at $1k or more I'd be fine paying it.
> Apple needs to realize the user base that wants a portable, one handed phone isn't the same market that wants a cheap phone.
The reality is that “I want a small phone” for most seems to mean “I would prefer that the phone is small but this is actually the least important factor for my purchase decision”. The set of people who bought the mini was quite small, estimated around 3% of sales.
You didn’t even buy the smallest phone. You got seduced by the thin phone but the 17 and 17 pro are both physically smaller devices corner to corner and would fit in your pocket better.
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I was still on my iPhone 12 mini until about a month ago. I was ready to buy an iPhone 16 Mini on launch day if it existed. My wife was on her iPhone 13 mini until about a week ago, and would have bought an iPhone 17 Mini if that was on offering instead of the iPhone Air. Apple's continued refusal to offer a newer Mini, combined with the iOS 26 bug & accessibility nightmare, got us to switch. We now each carry a Sunbeam F1 Pro.
I did! As much as I could as someone who can't stand iOS, anyway. I used the Pixel 1 and then the Pixel 4a, for 4 years each.
I have sympathy for folks who want a small phone and legitimately would buy it if available. Unfortunately the set of people who will actually buy a smaller phone seems to be very small, which is why all the manufacturers have just stopped. Apple with their two sizes seems to be trying harder than most manufacturers.
SE, 12 mini and 13 mini user here. Yes, I bought them.
The people who complain about wanting phones to be smaller are like me. We don't buy phones that often. Manufacturers will never cater to us, because I didn't replace my Pixel 2 XL until this year.
I can never compete with the market that replaces their phone every year. Nobody can. They are the ones that keep buying giant phones.
>It’s not as if Apple dislikes money. If they believed the market for small phones was large enough, they’d still be selling small phones.
Apple, like almost every business that size, only does things that are profitable enough. It's not enough to sell 1 million phones for a good profit, they try to avoid doing that.
> It's not enough to sell 1 million phones for a good profit
This is true but also not the entire story. Apple also has to consider:
* How many of that million would we sell anyway in a non-mini version?
* What will the margin be on these relative to our other phones?
* How much of our engineering resources will be siphoned into creating yet another variant that we could use for other efforts or to make our flagship phones better?
* What’s the long term support cost for yet another variant?
I’m one of those people. I’m carrying a second gen se.
You seem to have missed my point about manufacturers moving in lockstep.
Most people use a phone for at least two years. The way it happened in the 2010s, by the time someone is looking at buying a new one, all available phones on the market have already grown larger compared to their current one. So, they get sad and buy whatever is available.
Which is perhaps why Apple tried the iPhone Mini, to go back and see if they were missing a large market segment. Their answer was that some people bought it, but not enough to justify the product at Apple's scale.
There isn't a grand conspiracy to make everyone sad with big phones they don't want.
> Their answer was that some people bought it, but not enough to justify the product at Apple's scale.
This is the key thing. It’s not that no one wants it. But it’s a lot of engineering to produce another distinct hardware model and the market is tiny compared to the larger models.
Anecdotally, I, personally, know several people who bought the iPhone mini, some of them still using it.
I still blame Apple for considering that 3% of total iPhone sales is a failure. And then launching the iPhone air, as if it will do any better...
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Apple will have like 15 macbook skus but a small iphone is the straw that breaks the camels back.
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